Grand Strategy Crusader Kings III

[Kem0sabe]

You can only fuck a whore every 3 years? That sounds unreasonable.

 

[vonAchdorf]

As you can see from the screenshot - the brothel is for KWEENZ and only employs male whores.

 

[Beowulf]

As you can see from the screenshot - the brothel is for KWEENZ and only employs male whores.

A whore is a whore.

 

[Fedora Master]

I myself pre-ordered the fancy edition. Most likely I'll pirate the rest of the DLC when they start coming, but I trust the base game to be decent for what it is.

Spoiler

And Paradox deserves a little support since they're the only relevant developer within their niche.

Again, you're literally funding their globohomo agenda. A shameful slav.

 

[Van-d-all]

Spoiler

And Paradox deserves a little support since they're the only relevant developer within their niche.

2010s are over man. Their games have been in a constant decline since EU4, and that's 2014. HOI4, I:R and noticeably Stellaris are full of game breaking holes despite being vanity projects under their most skilled devs, undertaking revamps of core game systems and a steady stream of DLCs.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Their games have been in a constant decline since EU4, and that's 2014

Actually 2013. I made a steam account in order to buy it.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Spoiler

And Paradox deserves a little support since they're the only relevant developer within their niche.

2010s are over man. Their games have been in a constant decline since EU4, and that's 2014. HOI4, I:R and noticeably Stellaris are full of game breaking holes despite being vanity projects under their most skilled devs, undertaking revamps of core game systems and a steady stream of DLCs.

Dunno, man. Paradox titles are pretty much the only games which I still regularly play. In lack of good RPG releases every season (or even year at this point), I'll take 'em in lack of better alternatives.

 

[TemplarGR]

Dunno, man. Paradox titles are pretty much the only games which I still regularly play. In lack of good RPG releases every season (or even year at this point), I'll take 'em in lack of better alternatives.

The only game i play currently from them is Stellaris. Because it quite frankly is the best space 4X around, and that is some major despair, but you take what you can get. Galactic Civilization III is archaic, stuck in 15 years ago, and Endless Space 2 is all flash and no substance. The rest are just clones of Master of Orion, a mid-90s game.....

Other than that, i am only willing to touch Imperator, and that is because it is the only one with a semi-decent UI and fonts readable for human beings, and some effort put to make the map attractive. I can't stand their older games. They are tiring to suffer through.

 

[AgentFransis]

The only game i play currently from them is Stellaris. Because it quite frankly is the best space 4X around, and that is some major despair, but you take what you can get. Galactic Civilization III is archaic, stuck in 15 years ago, and Endless Space 2 is all flash and no substance. The rest are just clones of Master of Orion, a mid-90s game.....

Try Sword of the Stars (1 and/or 2). It features unique ftl types for every race, logistics, good ship designing, tactical combat (albeit realtime) with a nice combat model (ship armor is represented as a grid on each side and each weapon has a different impact pattern. Weapons have varying accuracy, mass drivers push ships around and can bounce off the armor etc.) and manages to keep micro low. 2 features better graphics and various changes to the systems but alas it was rushed (thanks to Paradox apparently who published it) so the AI is poor, UI is clunky and performance suffers on the larger maps in the late game. 1 is kinda ugly but features most of the same systems and reputedly has a very strong AI.

 

[Life of the Party]

Spoiler

Intro

Hey! My name is Björn Iversen and I worked as Audio Director on Crusader Kings 3. Finally, I get this opportunity to write a Dev Diary about what the audio team has been working on for a long time!

We will split up this Dev Diary into different parts: first off, I want to tell a little bit about the Audio Vision and what my ambitions were for game audio. Then we will talk about Sound Design, what is new and improved from previous games, and of course, last but not least, the Soundtrack.

Audio Vision

To start with a short backstory, it is quite a daunting task to work with the audio for Crusader Kings 3, since CK2 had so many years of development that included some of our most iconic soundtracks which are loved by the community. Later down the line we also started to add more Sound Design to the game which some of the community has appreciated a lot.

So initially the big question was: What is needed to be improved for the sequel? What do we want to keep from the previous game? What brand new audio features do we want to introduce?

The first and biggest step up we wanted to do in Crusader Kings III was to have Audio looped in as early in development as possible. CK2 was developed before my time as Audio Director and during those days the studio did not have any dedicated Sound Designers that helped out with the game audio.

First, Andreas Waldetoft (Our in-house Composer and close co-worker) and I could in the early stages of design work on what we wanted to do with the Soundtrack. Then I could also establish an Audio Vision for the Sound Design already at this stage. This would be helpful when my first Sound Designer, Gustav aka ParadoxGustav, would onboard the project to help out with Sound Design. This meant that we could work more on certain aspects that I felt were a bit lackluster in the Crusader Kings II, and the three main pillars for me were:

Storytelling

Since the game is about the characters, their actions, and the tales that are created, it was my ambition to bring all events and character actions more into life with the help of audio. As an example, we have added sound effects to the event backgrounds to enhance the immersion of the event, for instance, if it takes place in a Courtyard it should sound like it.

My goal is that it’s not only the Sound Design that should enhance the immersion of the storytelling, but also have the Music to help with that. A bit more about Music later in the diary.

The Map should feel alive

I always felt that it was a bit under-developed in the previous title, and since we have created such a beautiful map, it was important for me and the audio team that the map would sound great also. If you zoom in to an area of the map with a lot of rivers and forests, it should sound like it is alive. The same goes with holdings, they should sound populated based on the type and culture.

A more calm soundscape

Now, this might sound a bit too abstract, but hear me out! One of the main issues with the previous title was also how, unfortunately, every single audio and music asset wanted to play loud and all at the same time. Another one of our main goals was to have a much better soundscape in which no sound effects are competing with each other too much for a place in the mix, and that the music isn’t too intrusive for the player experience. Basically, we wanted the game to sound more “calm” which is more pleasing to the ears after long gaming sessions.

But enough writing about our goals, let’s show off some of the cool stuff we have been working on with some video footage!

Sound Design

Event Windows

So, the Event Windows have two elements of sound effects. The first one is an “Event Theme” as we call them, and there are different ones depending on the event. Also then, Art made these beautiful backgrounds for the Events, so we wanted to enhance them by adding ambience sound. Here is an example of Marriage Event with those two elements:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_xXohZvPQ4

If you listen carefully in the video you will hear a subtle feature, once the Event Window is on-screen, the map ambience is lowered in volume to add focus to the event so it’s more invoking to read and get immersed in the story.

And to add some extra flavor for the Events, sometimes the Music will also change when it appears. Here is a video with just the Music and the same Event for an example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31nXYMItkZA

Once all the pieces are put together you will get this result:



I think this is the right approach to enhance the storytelling element of our games that happens through Event Windows.

Since this worked really well with Event Windows we wanted to combine both SFX & Music for other instances in the game such as declaring war;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJBOzlKnpps

Ambience

As I mentioned before it was important that the map would sound more alive, and that it would sound different based on nature & holdings, which the team has succeeded in creating! Instead of writing so much about it, I would love to give some examples instead:

Ambience over England here you can hear the different Holdings and Nature ambience:



A personal favorite place on the map for listening to the ambience! I like the details of the river and holdings in this part.



As a third example we hover over India and listen to Dharmic Holdings:



Music

Hi, my name is Andreas Waldetoft aka Jazzhole on this forum, and I'm the Senior Composer here at Paradox. I have worked on most of our internal games throughout the years and have had the pleasure to work on Crusader Kings III as well.

As I composed CK2 back in the days we did not have to completely start from scratch with some of the more recognizable themes. We however wanted a soundtrack that would have much more depth in the sort of sounds one can expect to hear. For example, we have recorded many different medieval instruments, examples are Bagpipes, Hurdy-gurdy, Keyed fiddles, stringed instruments, and many different percussion instruments… to name a few. We also used a full orchestra, solo vocalists, and church choirs.

Björn has already talked about the use of cue tracks for events and storytelling, which is something we talked about right from the design phase a few years ago. Therefore we have cue-tracks and mood music as a kind of a cornerstone of the soundtrack.

The cue-tracks are often shorter pieces of music that reacts to events happening in the game.

Mood tracks are music that as the name implies, is meant to give a more calm moody experience that is pleasing to listen to for long hours.

Here is an example of a cue I did for an event called “The Crusade Starts”, it is from the Orchestral Session we had in Budapest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N9_hxy26Ok

I also did a few orchestral suites for the game to be used as main themes, this excerpt is from a piece called “Knights of Jerusalem” and is once again at the Budapest Scoring Orchestra recording session.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJc3qvqgfj8

Crusader Kings III has more music than any vanilla strategy game we have developed, so my good friend Philip Wareborn stepped in to help me compose music tracks for different situations in this game. You might have heard his music in the Stellaris: 4th Anniversary trailer which he helped compose.

That is it about the music, I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts once it is released.



Modding

There will be more updates regarding this in the future, but I will touch briefly on this topic now since I know that the community will ask about it… and yes, there is some modding support! There will be possibilities to change out the assets for Mood Tracks and Cue Tracks. It will also be possible to add more tracks as well.

This will be short and sweet for now, since I’ll probably need to create a forum post on how to mod the music but that will happen after release.

But here below is a video showcasing how I switch out “Declare War” Cue Track to another song from Stellaris.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEbxR9zTBuQ

So with that, it's time for me to wrap up this Dev Diary. I hope that you all got as excited as we are for you to hear the soundscape we have worked hard on for a long time.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Eastwood]

Dunno, man. Paradox titles are pretty much the only games which I still regularly play. In lack of good RPG releases every season (or even year at this point), I'll take 'em in lack of better alternatives.

The only game i play currently from them is Stellaris. Because it quite frankly is the best space 4X around, and that is some major despair, but you take what you can get. Galactic Civilization III is archaic, stuck in 15 years ago, and Endless Space 2 is all flash and no substance. The rest are just clones of Master of Orion, a mid-90s game.....

Other than that, i am only willing to touch Imperator, and that is because it is the only one with a semi-decent UI and fonts readable for human beings, and some effort put to make the map attractive. I can't stand their older games. They are tiring to suffer through.

I really want to like Stellaris, but the I have the feeling the game just gets progressively worse with each update. The game has great ideas, but they are all sloppily implemented.
The AI is completely braindead and can't even use half of the features they sell you as DLC. Then there's the huge problem with mid-late game performance and lack of automation, that they somehow still don't have figured out after 4 years of development.

You can see similar problems in their other games, like HOI4, Imperator and recently EU4. This does not make me optimistic for the state of CK3 at launch.

 

[Life of the Party]

Spoiler

Hello everyone and welcome to the 33rd CK3 Dev Diary!

I’m Matthew, one of the Programmers on the CK3 team, and today I am going to talk to you about the overhaul we’ve done to Feudal Contracts since Dev Diary 17.

A quick refresher on what Contracts are: every vassal above baron tier has an individual contract between them and their liege which affects how much the vassal gives to the liege in terms of tax and levies in exchange for the liege’s protection. In the case of Feudal vassals, this contract can be renegotiated.

We were not fully content with the initial implementation of this setup as it did not help facilitate the drama and storytelling of the deals made between a vassal and their liege and the disagreements that could arise from that. This was a view shared among the community as well which reinforced our desire to give this feature another look, so a couple of our designers and I gave it an overhaul.

The Contract

You may have seen screenshots or videos of this system in some of the media released from our press events but I’m gonna take you through the new system step by step, so without further ado here is the new interface you’ll see when you interact with a vassal’s feudal contract.

[Feudal contract negotiation screen]

As you can see there are a lot more options now to tailor the contract.

Going from top to bottom you can see that we have split the base tax and levy obligations into two separate tracks each now with five options. These are the core base of how much taxes and levies are given to the liege, the lower they are the more your vassal will like you, of course, and the higher they are the less content they will be.

When negotiating a new deal you can only move to adjacent levels of the tax and levy obligations.

Below that we have what we call the “Fine Print” options. These fine options are unlocked via various innovations and provide various modifications to the contract.

The first row being the Special Contract options of Scutage, March, and Palatinate which are available for vassals that are Dukes or Kings.

[Effects of scutage]

[Effects of march]

[Effects of palatinate]

At the bottom we have the rest of the Fine Print options available, these are things like guaranteeing your vassal a spot on the council or granting them coinage rights. Some options are only shown if the vassal meets specific conditions, for example if the vassal is of a different faith to the liege. In such a case the “Religious Protection” gives them special rights to practice their faith without risk of the liege demanding their conversion or converting the faith of their provinces.

The Negotiation

When negotiating the contract a max of three changes may be made. We experimented with different values and this felt like it wasn’t too limiting whilst also letting you too wildly change your contract in one go.

With the new obligations that can be changed and enacted this allows you to negotiate a more interesting deal. For example, you as the liege may want to increase the amount of taxes your vassal gives you, but just doing that alone will be viewed as unfair by the vassal and increase your tyranny.

[a contract proposal giving tyranny]

So if you don’t want to take that tyranny hit then you need to look at what changes you can propose that the vassal will want, so in exchange for these increased taxes you could guarantee your vassal a spot on the council meaning you can now enact this deal without being viewed as a tyrant.

[a contract proposal with a fair trade]

Alternatively, if you have a hook on your vassal then you can use that hook to count as one free change in favour of the vassal, so you can use your hook and get those higher taxes without having to give any other concessions and not be viewed as a tyrant. Blackmailing people is surprisingly effective.

[a contract proposal using a hook to avoid tyranny]

It is worth mentioning that even if you propose a “fair” trade that does not give you tyranny this does not mean that the vassal will be perfectly content. There is an opinion change tied to each obligation and what status it is in, vassals will tend to dislike paying more and like paying less, and this opinion modifier will be present in the vassal’s view of their liege.

The vassal themselves can of course also negotiate the contract, they have the added restriction that they must offer their liege an even trade. So they cannot ask to pay lower taxes without using either a hook or agreeing to give the liege something they would want, be that giving more levies, agreeing to stay with only partition succession, or giving up a benefit they have previously been given such as that guaranteed council spot.

Some vassals start with contracts different to the default, in the Holy Roman Empire all vassals start with low taxes and levies to represent the internal state and the lower amount of control the Emperor was exerting over their vassals at the time.

We really wanted the interface to make this feel like an actual paper contract being signed between the liege and the vassal, thankfully we had this beautiful parchment background and wax seal shader lying around that helped spice it up.

Modding Contracts

All of these different obligations, their effects, how the AI uses them, and how they are shown in the UI is controlled in the script files so you can mod in or change existing obligations to your heart’s content.

Spoiler

religious_rights = {
display_mode = checkbox

is_shown = {

NOT = {

scope:vassal.faith = scope:liege.faith

}

}

obligation_levels = {

religious_rights_none = {

default = yes



ai_liege_desire = @ai_standard_liege_desire

ai_vassal_desire = 0

}

religious_rights_protected = {

is_valid = {

NOT = {

scope:vassal.faith = scope:liege.faith

}

}

parent = religious_rights_none



vassal_opinion = 5



vassal_modifier = {

county_opinion_add = 5

}



flag = religiously_protected



ai_liege_desire = 0

ai_vassal_desire = 10

}

}
}

Here we have the script database entry for the religious protection obligation type, it demonstrates the various options and should be fairly self explanatory in its naming of the options.

I hope you’ve all enjoyed this dev diary and are excited for the new Feudal Contracts and the more options and interactions they can provide between vassals and lieges!

We look forward to seeing you next week, in the meanwhile if you want to chat more then I highly recommend joining our CK Discord Server as well!

 

[vonAchdorf]

Individual feudal contracts are a cool idea. I hope it won't be either busy work or largely inconsequential.

 

[IDtenT]

All I'd want to do is force gavelkind on my multi-duchy Dukes.

 

[Average Manatee]

Religious protection should be interesting as a vassal in certain areas of the world. I hope there's some way to negotiate a general realm-wide contract though, keeping track of every individual vassal could get tedious. Especially if you have to spy on every single count to get blackmail in order to raise taxes or take a -20 opinion penalty that lasts for decades.

 

[vonAchdorf]

All I'd want to do is force gavelkind on my multi-duchy Dukes.

Can't you ask them to change the inheritance law already?

 

[IDtenT]

All I'd want to do is force gavelkind on my multi-duchy Dukes.

Can't you ask them to change the inheritance law already?

I think you can, but it's not contractual / permanent.

 

[Average Manatee]

I dunno, being contractually obligated to divide up duchies sounds like it might be too easy

 

[Kem0sabe]

Its coming out on xbox gamepass. MS added it to the gamepass recently added tab, tho there is no install button or proper game page, seems to have been added early by mistake.

 

[IDtenT]

10.12MB.

Could pop it on a few stiffies.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

It's like Wasteland 3 just preinstall. It will be released on Xbox Gamepass for PC on 1st Spetember for free.
For now you have this: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/plebby-quest-the-crusades-simply-great.133793/

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Game pass version will work as a good full demo at least. Will let me play it a bit and see how I like it and if the right and proper way of playing Paradox games will be available, which is buy the game itself for full price and then liberate the hundreds of dollars in DLC for use in your legal base game.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[IDtenT]

Wait. Do they have a prerelease version of CK3 to do this?